Requirements

Phar requires PHP 5.2.0 or newer. Additional features require the
SPL extension in order to take advantage
of iteration and array access to a Phar's file contents. The phar
stream does not require any additional extensions to function.

You may optionally wish to enable the zlib
and bzip2 extensions to take
advantage of compressed phar support. In addition, to take advantage of
OpenSSL signing, the OpenSSL extension must be
enabled.

Note that a bug in the zlib.deflate stream filter
fixed in PHP version 5.2.6 and newer may cause truncation of gzip and bzip2-compressed
phar archives.